26 August 2026

In this episode, Dr Richard Hames, philosopher, author, and strategic foresight practitioner, reflects on his keynote speech at the 2026 Education Leaders Day. He shares insights into leadership and learning in South Australia’s public education system, using the metaphor of hot air balloons to illustrate how schools can break free from old ways of thinking. Dr Hames highlights the importance of language, trust, community, and curiosity for educators seeking to create genuine change.

Show Notes

Transcript

Dale Atkinson: Hello and welcome to Teach, a podcast about teaching and learning in South Australia. My name is Dale Atkinson from South Australia's Department for Education, and today I'm joined by Dr. Richard Hames, a philosopher-activist, author, strategic foresight practitioner, and the keynote speaker at this year's Education Leaders' Day. Welcome, Richard.

Dr Richard Hames: Thank you very much, Dale.

Dale Atkinson: For those who aren't familiar with your work how would you describe what you do and how that connects to our public education system in South Australia?

Dr Richard Hames: I do so much. It's difficult for me even to really put anything in a box because I've never had a career. I've been very spontaneous and seen opportunities and taken them. My life has touched education occasionally. I was Head of the Film and Television School in Australia for a while. Before that, I started contemporary music at the Victorian College of the Arts, and even before that, this is going back, half a century, I was on the staff at Dartington College of Arts, where I was actually teaching teachers how to... music teachers how to teach. So, my life has gone in and out of education, but I'm more known as a mentor and as a strategist for multinational corporations and governments. They seek my advice on different aspects of what's happening today and potentially what that could mean in the future. And obviously one of the most critical aspects of what I do is the next generation and how we prepare our young people. And I have nine children and 17 grandchildren, so it's very much key for me for us to understand what could be the future we're moving into and what are the implications then for our children.

Dale Atkinson: And obviously schools are at the forefront of that conversation. So, you gave the keynote at the Education Leaders’ Day yesterday. The title of that was Hot Air Balloons: How to Overcome Gravity. Can you unpack that metaphor for us?

Dr Richard Hames: I thought you would ask me that because I neglected to, throughout the keynote, I forgot that was the title and I forgot to pack it, unpack it. I started off by saying I hope what I was going to give them wasn't all hot air filling the balloon. But the whole notion of a community within the basket, that ropes need to be untethered, you need to trust and be confident in each other, you need to let go of some of the things that, you know that, that exist when you're actually on the ground, and be, and trust in the wind to guide you in the right direction or know when to burn the burner and when not to, when to throw the ballast overboard. It was those kinds of things, and the idea that all these leaders are a community. They're not just individual leaders. Leadership comes through the community rather than individuals. So that was the point of the metaphor.

Dale Atkinson: I think one of the things that struck me was around the idea of gravitational pull…

Dr Richard Hames: Yes

Dale Atkinson: And the way that systems, and I'm sure if you spoke to leaders generally within the South Australian public education system and perhaps everywhere, they would say that at times we are tethered to the past or old patterns and ways of working. How is it that you, within a system, structure and move away from those to the outcome that you're looking for?

Dr Richard Hames: One, and the most important probably, is a change in language, because language shapes everything we think we can do or not. It shapes our behaviour. And so, a good example I can give you actually is from an experience I had a few years ago when AMP, one of Australia's iconic companies, was in a merger negotiations with AXA, the French insurance company, and they called me into the Sydney office because they were stuck. The merger team was stuck. And I was listening carefully to why they were stuck, and everything was so difficult. It was too difficult to do this, and they couldn't talk to so and so because he didn't understand, and they really had struggled for about two to three weeks. And I simply said, "What if you change your language to one that suddenly it's easy? What would that look like? What would it feel like? What would have had to have happened for it to be easy?" And it simply unblocked everything. So, questions matter and asking the right question at the right time can unblock a lot of things. So, I think language is critically important. The other thing is the, it's called path dependency theory. It's the idea that the gravity of the past pulls us so much to the decisions we make today, that we're unconscious that we're simply repeating what we've always done. And the big question mark in terms of educators is now, with the world we're moving into, which is highly brittle and unpredictable and uncertain and changing and accelerating in terms of change, what is an education for? My challenge would be “Is schooling sufficient?” And I believe it's not. I believe we need to move into a new era of what an education is for, rather than the industrial paradigm, which is really education is for producing compliant citizens and a compliant and skilled workforce. That no longer applies. So, it's those two things, language and epistemology.

Dale Atkinson: And how is it as a leader of a school, you're essentially the mayor of a small town in many respects, how do you reframe your own mindset to be forward-thinking and to consider some of those things you're talking about in terms of changing the paradigm of the language that you're using?

Dr Richard Hames: I think there are a number of things you can do, and the most important you've just mentioned is foresight, developing foresight. The leaders I've come across in so many instances believe they… their work is overwhelmingly complicated, and there's too much. There's ... it's overwhelming in terms of what we have to do.

But if you can find a pattern in what you do, you can find a point where things are tied together. You can clump things together, and it's the action you take in terms of that clumping that reduces the burden, if you like, of what has to be done. I think finding that choice in the context of what has to be the most important context for teachers, which is the future, is absolutely critical.

I think also, the ... when I think about my own children, what's worked best is when we learn from children rather than trying to impose our learning on them. And certainly, being free to do that means turning upside down conventional wisdom about what learning is and how you manage a complicated environment like a school.

But the most important factor is that a school is not a machine. If you treat it like a machine, you will pay attention to so many different things that you'll be exhausted, and you deserve to be exhausted because it's stupid. It really is, and it's futile. If you treat it like a living organic system and understand how those things work, then it's all about relationships and influencing, a narrative story, and things become a lot easier in that context.

Dale Atkinson: It's interesting as a living organism and you obviously stood in front of a large group of expectant leaders with their hopeful, interested, hopefully engaged faces yesterday for the keynote speech. And they do the similar thing weekly at the staff meeting. What's the frame of reference that they should be applying in those conversations that they have with people who may have different preparedness for change or different defensiveness or optimism?

Dr Richard Hames: Open mind. I think I saw those people that those 1,000 people yesterday, I saw two things. The wisdom was not with me – it was in the room. They are on the ground trying to solve problems, which also is the wrong metaphor to use because problem-solving is this industrial way of thinking about issues. It's not. Problem-solving doesn't really work today unless you're in that industrial context. So, we have to find new ways, and that's through conversation. It's through asking different questions, deeper questions, more profound questions, curiosity of what other people think, but keeping an open mind, I think, absolutely critical. So, I saw the wisdom in the room as being most important, and that's empowering if it's done within the context of a living, organic system. It's not so empowering if you're relying on the Messiah to give you answers or the expert to give you answers. It's, it can be quite confining, and it becomes a burden once again.

Dale Atkinson: I think one of the comforting things about the, the Messiah theory is that at least it gives you something to orient yourself around.

Dr Richard Hames: It can do, but perhaps it's the wrong orientation. That's a great danger.

Dale Atkinson: Yeah, and this is my question, I think, which is when you are in a system that is trying to implement change but also trying to anticipate a future that's very unclear what is it that you cling onto as a leader? What should you be clinging onto as a leader in that environment?

Dr Richard Hames: I think trust in the community. The work I do is very much at a civilizational or species level context in terms of questions. Can humanity survive what we've done to us? And that's impacting the climate, it's impacting social cohesion or lack of it. It's impacting technology and the fact that our brains ... essentially human beings, we're a weird lot and we ... if you want to summarise what we are, we're effectively chimps with smartphones in our hands. And we have all of that to deal with in an environment that we're not sure how to manage. So at that level, I mean it's frightening. It can be frightening.

Dale Atkinson: Can I talk to you about your background as a music teacher. So obviously when you're learning a musical instrument, there's that combination of having to learn technical proficiency and just being able to do the doing before you get to choose to be more creative. What's the right balance between focusing on the day-to-day technical things within a organisational environment and leaving space for the creative?

Dr Richard Hames: I think they're combined. I often criticise people who talk about work-life balance because I think if you enjoy what... if you're enjoying living your life, then the, that difference is almost invisible – it's perhaps a semi-permeable membrane, but very little else. So, in music teaching, when you're teaching skills, when you're teaching life, I think the two are combined. This is why I think it's so important to move away from disciplines and compartments into projects where you're taught maths or English or an Aboriginal language or other things as part of the project of work. I think that's absolutely essential.

Dale Atkinson: And are you seeing places where this is being done really well, where they're breaking out of old paradigms and approaching things differently?

Dr Richard Hames: A few at the moment. I mean it's slow because I think that realisation, that epiphany that things do have to change has been emergent. It's been slow, but it's accelerating. So yes, I do see examples. In the public education system in Australia and I know New South Wales and Victoria probably better than I know here, but what you're doing or trying to do in South Australia will lead the rest of the country in breakthrough thinking. There's no doubt about that. So, the other states have yet to catch up with what you're doing here, and Martin Westwell's leadership is critical in that.

Dale Atkinson: We're incredibly parochial, so I'm sure our listeners will be delighted to hear that in South Australia.

Dr Richard Hames: I would go further. I mean, normally I wouldn't say this, and I didn't say it in the keynote. But in terms of examples, certainly regionally and perhaps even globally, if you can achieve your stated goals of why, the system you're trying to change, then you will be an iconic example for people around the world… quite literally.

Dale Atkinson: Yeah right, well we'll take that. What's the habit of mind and action that leaders should be looking to get in place for themselves?

Dr Richard Hames: The first thing is to let go of the notion that leadership is to do with status and position. It's not. Leadership is a human phenomenon where people come together to share experiences, to share knowledge, and to collaborate in an effort to, or a determination to improve one or more aspects of what it means to be human. That's what leadership is. It has very little to do with the individual being the principal of a school in isolation. That's not leadership. That's management.

Dale Atkinson: If anyone's listening who perhaps didn't have the opportunity to hear your keynote speech yesterday, what is the one takeaway that you would like them to have?

Dr Richard Hames: One I used in the speech was the image of the imaginal cells. In any system which is in a process of metamorphosis, and you can go from our civilisation, human civilisation, right down to the educational system in South Australia, what you're trying to do is transform what you have been into something different. And the metaphor I used was the metaphor of metamorphosis where the caterpillar changes into a chrysalis in order to create a different DNA that allows it to emerge as a butterfly. And what happens scientifically, biologically, in the chrysalis is a meltdown. It gradually breaks down and melts into a kind of soup. Out of that soup, there are a few… what are called imaginal cells that carry the DNA of the new creature within it. They're attacked. The immune system of the caterpillar tries to kill those off because they're alien, and you get that in the education system as well. You have people who are so tied to the past that they don't want the future to happen. So you will be attacked if you're, if you've got new ideas, innovation, you're coming from there. But eventually, those imaginal cells more and more and more find each other. They clump together, and they become unkillable, and they are the, the future of the butterfly. They turn into the new creature and are able to have wings and fly. And the thing I didn't say yesterday was the metaphor applies in terms of the hot air balloon. When you are untethered and you find flight, and the passion and the energy lifts you up, that's the kind of thing you're looking for. That's when you know the system that you're working on, the new strategy, is actually working.

Dale Atkinson: And what does public schooling look like if we're successful in launching the balloon?

Dr Richard Hames: In the future, I would imagine schools will put, be put to a different use. The buildings will be put to a different use. Learning will become intergenerational. The usual standards that apply today won't apply. Systems or processes like NAPLAN will disappear as being irrelevant, and an entirely new model will come into existence.

Dale Atkinson: That's very exciting as an educator to be involved in that chrysalis change. Dr. Richard Hames, thanks for your time.

Dr Richard Hames: It's a great pleasure. I hope it was more than just of interest.